Neato. Can't wait to try it out. I'm making good progress with my TA. I added a bus (which connects you to another section of town), and you can now play lotto tickets, buy 40's, food, smokes etc... There's a lot of work left to do. So far so good though. I'm not getting stuck or losing steam.

Ok, cool. Just took a look. So you know, my story is sort of along similar lines, as far as ghosts and whatnot go, but my main character is a douche bag, not a paranormal investigator, so I doubt there will be much overlap.

The story looks good, there's a lot of potential there. The letter is a nice touch, artifacts within a story build realism. Fun! I'm not sure if I want to post anymore updates of my game until it is finished. Then again I may want feedback. I don't know yet. I'm still plotting out the environment. Once I finish that I can populate it with characters and objects.

My story us actually about an alternate universe that the Uncle is trapped in and must be rescued from. The "ghosts" are actually "shadows" from this other world crossing over to ours. The nephew must get the Uncle's machine running and find him. The things here is that the house is actually the portal activated by the machine, this is why the title concerns the house. When you open a door to a room, or outside, you are entering a different portion of this alternate dimension.

Neato. Can't wait to try it out. I'm making good progress with my TA. I added a bus (which connects you to another section of town), and you can now play lotto tickets, buy 40's, food, smokes etc... There's a lot of work left to do. So far so good though. I'm not getting stuck or losing steam.

I like the presentation so far Rick. Very ominous and atmospheric. The mansion picture reminds me of Japanese horrors for some reason. The story sounds very interesting. Curious what you will make of the other world. I do hope you will be willing to add an illustration here and there, in the vein of Lunatix (http://www.prowler-pro.com/logic/ltic6.jpg), but if that is a problem for you, at least I hope you'll be interested in implementing change in interface colour and font as the player enters different sections of the games.

Also rollie, great to hear you making progress on your project too. I feel the return of positive creative energy in the community.

Logged

"Things like Basic and Free Basic provide much-needed therapy and a return to sanity and a correct appreciation of people. The arrogant folk really hate a word like 'Basic' - fine, and good riddance." ~ pragmatist

Thanks. The pics are a good idea, I'll have to see what I can come up with. The computer I do my dev work on crapped out on me, so it may be slow going for a while. I am currently working on the story line; the little title sequence was mainly to get me in the right frame of mind. I'll keep you all posted on my progress.

"Things like Basic and Free Basic provide much-needed therapy and a return to sanity and a correct appreciation of people. The arrogant folk really hate a word like 'Basic' - fine, and good riddance." ~ pragmatist

Yeah, things are moving along. My dev box is sort-of-working, so I am making progress, albeit a bit slow. I need to flesh out the story a bit on tthis. I have a general idea, but translating that into concrete locations and associated puzzles and text is not as easy as it sounds. I'll try and clean it up a bit and post the house chapter so you can get a flavor of the overall game.

"Things like Basic and Free Basic provide much-needed therapy and a return to sanity and a correct appreciation of people. The arrogant folk really hate a word like 'Basic' - fine, and good riddance." ~ pragmatist

I haven't forgotten about this. I am rewriting the internal structure using objects which will make it very easy to add in new rooms and items. I was using a rather clunky type-based system, which wasn't working very well. With the new system, rooms and items are objects, with a room containing 0 or more items. The rooms are contained within a room collection which handles all the interaction between a room and the command parser. Once I get this working, all I need to do is to define a room, add any items to the room, and then add the room to the room collection and the game will automatically handle the new room. It will make updating the game very easy.

I have to say I have really gotten bogged down on this. It simply isn't working out as I had hoped. I like the story on this though, so rather than junk it, I might just turn this into an adventure-like game. Not being an artist, it'll probably be just an ascii game sort of like the ZZT or Kroz games.

Was the problem the parser and puzzles? The script? Or just the graphics? I think you might have overrated the difficulty of implementing graphics. I still think you can create a very eerie atmosphere just employing free images from the net (together with well picked/composed music), appropriately resized and with some simple effects applied on them (like blurring, recoloring, fog), and maybe only have to employ some basic photoshoping of few "key" game images.

Whatever path you chose, I hope you complete this project in some form.

Logged

"Things like Basic and Free Basic provide much-needed therapy and a return to sanity and a correct appreciation of people. The arrogant folk really hate a word like 'Basic' - fine, and good riddance." ~ pragmatist

I had a brain-wave on this that I am going to try. I have Doom and a Doom editor so I can build some scenes in Doom take a screenshot, resize and use them. This way the graphics will have a consistent, albeit Doomish feel. Having a Doomish feel might not be that bad actually.